Quake is the result of id Software making use of its next proprietary engine after the first one. Technically designated idTech 2, it is also known as the Quake engine. It is also known as the first workable engine that can run a shooter game and everything in it, from models and levels to particle effects in full 3D. There are no sprites and no illusions of depth or height.
The game engine also has its own physics, which made it very much different from other 3D game engines of the time, many of which resorted to hard-coded animations for otherwise mundane occurrences like an object falling onto the ground.
Quake's designers decided that the first game built with idTech 2 should also be an extensive tech demo for the engine, so much so that this would appear to be the main focus of the game. Consequently, the premise and story of the game, or lack of it, may have suffered in terms of clarity.
The setting and premise of the game can be too otherworldly, even by id's standards. The game appears to have Lovecraftian influences mixed with elements from Doom and even the Hexen/Heretic games. The result is a slightly unsettling blend of themes from these IPs.
(One of the reasons appears to be John Carmack's insistence on the game having very otherworldly themes while retaining Doom-like qualities.)
However, the result does deliver what the game has promised: oppressive atmospheres, as will be described later.
To briefly describe, or perhaps condense the entire story to its essentials, it is about an an all-too-familiar otherworldly invasion of some human military bases. A single survivor is all that is left to offer any resistance to the invaders, but this one is (unsurprisingly) a very tough and fierce one, and most importantly, single-mindedly determined to bring the fight to the enemy.
In other words, the story/premise is really only an excuse to have the player character shooting up plenty of enemies that canonically deserve murder. It should not have mattered to anyone interested in the FPS genre and its core values of fun (at least for the genre and its lack of narrative focus at the time).
The gameplay mechanics are however the highlights of the game.
The first aspect that the player encounters is the controls, or more precisely, how the player character is handled. This can be seen even before properly starting a game: the main menu will be in the foreground of a game demo, a tradition of id Software brought over from the days of Doom.
The player character, as to be expected of a spiritual successor to the one in Doom, is a swift fighter whose momentum can never be slowed by external means, e.g. enemy attacks. He can glide across maps very quickly and in the hands of a skilled player (or one that has memorized the level layout), can flow through corridors with many twists and turns like water. What makes him different from his predecessor, however, is his ability to jump.
With a tap of a button, the player character makes the appropriate (and very brief) animation while gaining a short burst of vertical momentum. With this, he can naturally navigate bumpy, terraced terrain (as opposed to his predecessor, which required such terrain be equipped with model-displacing scripts). The option to jump allows Quake's level designers to create platformer-like segments, which break up the pace of running-and-gunning in the game.
Jumping also has peculiar physics, which is an occurrence likely due to design oversights. In their effort to conserve player characters' momentum when they jump, they had overlooked the fact that the vertical displacement from the act of jumping also adds additional momentum. This allows crafty players to string together jumps, allowing them to build up speed until they are hopping across levels at ridiculous paces. The exploit was later known as "bunny-hopping".
There is also another variant of this exploit, which apparently involved the unintended imparting of momentum from the acting of simply turning a character. This variant is known as "strafe-jumping".
Such exploits allowed for very entertaining (if rather disorienting) speed-runs through single-player levels, though their consequences in multiplayer may not be as entertaining.
The mechanics of jumping also allowed players to make use of another unintended physics exploit involving explosive weapons, as will be explained later.
Like his predecessor too, the player character has an on-screen object representing his currently equipped weapon, which is situated in the middle of the heads-up display and generally points to where the munitions or method of attack of the weapon will land when it is fired. It is up to the player to line up the player character accordingly to score hits on targets, e.g. the act of "aiming".
The act of aiming is assisted with some auto-aim scripts, which allow munitions fired from a weapon to hit enemies which are not directly in front of the weapon but slightly off to the sides and top/bottom. So far, the act of aiming to shoot at enemies would appear to be not much different from that in Doom.
Unfortunately, Quake also appears to have retained a few design setbacks from Doom with respect to aiming. The worst of these is the inability to look up or down using the mouse, which is a vestige of Doom. The player character can look up or down, but he/she will have to use buttons for that, which makes for very cumbersome shooting of anything that happens to be situated above or below the player character. This problem is compounded further by the fully 3D environments, which allow the creation of levels with multiple floors and platforms at variable heights over other platforms, many of which block sight and shots.
Fortunately, there were attempts to stave off any complications that would arise from having to target two enemies that are residing in the same lateral position but along different heights. The auto-aiming system has been designed so as to only work in a cone emanating from the front of the player character's hitbox, so the player will have to orient the perspective to look in the direction of the target to be shot at. Unfortunately, attempts to adjust viewing angles while avoiding enemy fire are awkward to perform, especially in the game's competitive multiplayer where players are not likely to stay relatively still.
There have been a lot of references to Doom thus far in this review, but the player should be informed that Quake is far from being an update of Doom.
One of the fundamental differences is that Quake does not use simple methods to ramp up the difficulty of the single-player game if the player chooses to play at higher difficulty levels, such as the constant respawning of enemies in the early Doom games. Instead, Quake resorts to ramping up the aggressiveness of enemies in addition to the customary increases in toughness and damage output.
The player will not be facing increasing incoming rates of enemies that are otherwise no different in their keenness in killing the player character, but instead faces enemies of greater ferocity, e.g. they make attacks much more frequently.
Another difference concerns the design of levels. In Doom, the levels are essentially singular 2D planes, with only illusions of height. In Quake, the full 3D environments encourage the level designers to go for levels with more verticality; they also reduced the lateral size of levels. There are no long corridors broken up by massive pillars and columns in Quake like there were in Doom.
Therefore, the Pistol, which was most useful in Doom when shooting at faraway enemies, is not in this game as the default weapon. It is instead the Shotgun, the spread of which is much tighter than the one in Doom; this in turn makes it a peculiar hybrid between Doom's Pistol and Shotgun.
The levels will be described in more detail later, after more elaboration on the designs of the weapons.
In addition to the Shotgun, another default weapon is the Axe, which has a strong attack but is otherwise an unremarkable melee weapon. It also does not appear to be in thematic agreement with the other weapons, which are more sci-fi than the crude and barbaric Axe.
The other weapons are best encountered by the player for the first time through the single-player campaign, as their debut and subsequent retrieval often places the player character in situations that are best shot out of using said weapons.
All of these weapons (other than the Axe) require ammunition to be used, with every pair using the same ammunition, not unlike Doom. However, the HUD now conveniently lumps weapons and their ammunition together; pictorial icons are used instead of text to represent them in the HUD.
Incidentally, these icons are also present on the models of ammunition pickups, for ease of association.
The other weapon that consumes shotgun shells is the Super Shotgun, which is the spiritual successor to the Double-Barrelled Shotgun in Doom II. It handles a lot like the Shotgun, only with much greater damage (and thus more efficiency at close range) and greater spread in return for slightly slower firing rates.
The next weapon is the Nailgun, which fires nails at enemies and is not a hit-scan weapon compared to the shotguns. Most enemies require a lot of nails to be slain, but every nail appears to stagger enemies (except enemy player characters and the bigger enemies), effectively forcing them into a helpless animation loop.
These two early weapons do however render the default Shotgun quite useless, as compared to the Pistol in Doom (which is the only weapon that is effective at long range, after all). Coupled with the rather impractical Axe, the practical designs for the default weapons can be quite disappointing.
This disappointment is again seen when the Chain Nail Gun is found. It appears to be a faster firing version of the Nail Gun, but otherwise have the same firing properties, which makes it a straight-upgrade.
Yet, the other weapons that are yet to be described would be fun enough to make most players forget that they have feeble weapons for their default tools of murder.
The Grenade Launcher is perhaps the weapon that showcases the newfangled (at the time) engine the most, out of all the weapons in Quake. It makes use of the physics scripting to have its munitions follow projectile arcs that allows the player character to bombard any enemies lurking on platforms above him but which he otherwise cannot see. The Grenades also bounce off walls, so the player can direct them around corners to flush out any enemies that happen to be lurking in dark crevices. They can also be launched down shafts to saturate the floor below, assuming that the timers for the Grenades do not reach zero before they have a chance to detonate for maximum damage.
Unfortunately, the controls for looking up and down cause the use of the Grenade Launcher to be more than a little difficult.
The Rocket Launcher is a lot like the one in Doom, except that explosions of Rockets (and those of Grenades) are now physics-powered. In normal use, the Rocket Launcher launches rockets that can be directed at walls, floors and ceilings so that their splash damage harms anything nearby, or direct hits can be made against slow and big enough enemies (or any enemies if the player has enough skill) for tremendous damage.
When the physical properties of explosions are exploited, however, the Rocket Launcher becomes a tool that is more useful than it seems.
In Doom, the displacement of objects affected by explosions was hard-coded, and even so displacements only occur unto slain characters. id Software retained the tradition of having explosions push things around, except that they may have an easier time with the physics-scripting in idTech 2.
An unwitting design oversight causes any in-game models that is not in contact with lateral surfaces below them and are subjected to the engine's 'natural' physics-scripting, e.g. on-foot characters that are not standing on floors, to be launched into the air when explosions occur beneath them.
This allows the player character to jump and fire a rocket beneath him. As silly as this is (at the time), this allows the player character to reach higher places that he could not otherwise go to without navigating through levels in a way that the level designers have intended. Thus, this unintended bug has allowed for very entertaining speed-runs of the campaign levels in Quake, together with the "bunny-hopping" and "strafe-jumping" exploit.
It is unfortunate that the two launchers share the same ammunition. Considering that the Grenade Launcher is not as powerful as the Rocket Launcher, it is a less efficient consumer of explosive ammo. However, being able to bounce explosives around corners makes the Grenade Launcher more useful in damaging enemies that the player cannot yet see.
The Lightning Gun is the result of id Software's experiment on rapid loops for the firing of hit-scan weapons, as well as graphical representation of lightning. It is a powerful weapon that can ruin any target very quickly, and as a quirk, it kills anything in a body of water when fired into it. (However, the effects of electrocution appear to be restricted to only a region of certain size for bodies of water that are very large.) There will be more details of bodies of water later, which are a new level design tool afforded by the idTech 2 engine.
Every weapon has unique sound effects, which will be handy in multiplayer when a player has to identify what weapons that his/her opponents are using. Most of them sound satisfactorily brutal to various degrees according to their respective killing power, so most players would not find them aurally wanting.
Yet, as fun as these weapons are, they appear to be better designed for the single-player game. In multiplayer, the differences between them resulted in perceived imbalances; the Rocket Launcher and the Lightning Gun in particular were criticized the most. Both were said to be powerful enough to slay newly respawned player characters very quickly, and the speed of their munitions (or lack thereof, in the case of the hit-scan Lightning Gun) renders them superior over other weapons.
In addition to weapons (the models for which are lit by special lighting scripts and floating in mid-air when spawned into the game world), there are other items that player characters can retrieve. These are staples of the shooter genre (at the time): health kits for replenishment of health, ammunition caches and pick-ups for a secondary hit-point meter, known as "armor" in this game.
It is worth noting here that health could not go beyond 100 units and stay that way. The excess amounts diminishes over time, thus necessitating the retrieval of health kits if a player is prone to taking a lot of damage instead of avoiding it.
There are underwater-based environments in this game, which is a feature new to the FPS genre. The player character (and others) can begin to drown underwater, after half a minute of immersion. This appears to crimp underwater exploration, and also allowed for the re-introduction of the enviro-suit power-up, which is a hold-over from Doom. In addition to rendering the player character unaffected by the effects of dangerous environments like pools of toxic sludge, it also allows the player to stay underwater as long as the duration of the power-up has not run out yet.
Inadvertently, this power-up may also give away the locations of secret rooms that may only be accessed from underwater paths, which takes away some of the surprise from stumbling upon said secrets (but does not detract from the satisfaction of finding them, of course).
Other power-ups include other hold-overs from Doom, such as invisibility and invincibility power-ups, both of which cause amusing visual changes to the HUD.
A new power-up that is introduced in the Quake franchise is the Quad Damage power-up, which quadruples the amount of damage that the player character may inflict. In return for this power, the player character will have very obvious visual effects, more so than even invincibility, while its duration runs.
It is worth noting that there are no minor pick-ups in Quake, unlike Doom which had items like Stimpaks and Armor Shards. However, whatever is there is adequate enough to sustain the player throughout the single-player game, assuming that the player has a satisfactory modicum of skill.
Every kind of pick-up is accompanied by unique sound effects, so that the player knows when a maneuver that doesn't place the pick-up item in sight has successfully brought the player character over said pick-up.
The single-player campaign would be the main attraction for most of id Software's fans. As mentioned earlier, it is only an excuse for the player character to murder a lot of virtual monsters (and be murdered in return) while on the way towards the exit of every level from its point of entry. However, this simple quest is made fun through interesting enemy designs and levels that make full use of the 3D environmental system.
The single-player mode is broken up into several chapters, which can be played in any order (not unlike Doom's chapters). Regardless of the chapter chosen, the player character always start with only default weapons to bear on enemies, though the initial bunches of enemies, who are former human soldiers driven madly traitorous, are relatively easy to defeat compared to the later ones.
The later ones are outright inhuman, though some have humanoid shapes (for purposes of animation). All of them are satisfactorily hideous to look at, and may earn the admiration of fans of dark fictional lore like Lovecraft's Cthulu mythos.
A ubiquitous example of an enemy is the Ogre, which is a tough brute with a grenade launcher and a chainsaw. Then, there are the Knights with their swords, and their bigger, nastier cousins, the Death Knights. Then, there are powerful enemies like the Shamblers, which serve as mini-bosses of sorts.
Like in the Doom games, enemies can express animosity towards each other in violent manners if they are caught in friendly fire. Having enemies fight each other, like in Doom, is a viable tactic in this game, and is just as, if not more, amusing to watch unfold.
Most enemies can be quite a handful to handle, especially at higher difficulties. However, the challenge of fighting them is somewhat diminished because all of them have the same search-and-destroy scripts, and can easily get lost when their path-finding programming fails them.
As for the bosses themselves, they are only two in the game which are unique. One is of the situational sort, while the other has the player character making use of cover more than ever in the rest of the game. They are certainly not of the sort that can be defeated by run-and-gun and keep-away tactics, namely the bosses in id Software's earlier games.
Unlike enemies in Doom, who present only walking animations when they are idle and unaware of the player character's presence, the creatures in Quake have their own unique idle animations in both sentry and patrol modes. A good example are the Ogres, which have a clumsy gait as they patrol corridors and animations that suggest drowsiness as they watch a corner for anything that comes around.
It is unfortunate however that the player is not given much of an opportunity - outside of cheating - to watch them in their idle state, as these animations give them some personality that place them a slight notch above enemies in most other shooters of the time.
Animations in this game appear to be made using the same techniques for Doom's generation of games; in the latter, different sprites are strung together to give a semblance of motion. In Quake, scripts for various poses are used to give animation to in-game entities instead, thus giving them a stop-motion like quality. It is worth noting though that full, smooth animations of 3D models had not been present in the FPS genre yet.
Enemies that appear to use guns drop backpacks that contain ammunition, though which type of ammo is not visually apparent; certain enemies do drop certain types of ammo, so players can eventually learn which type of ammo that said enemies yield by way of association.
Some enemies in this game have their own sound effects, though many share the same sound clips. Nevertheless, these sound effects are still effective at alerting a player to any enemies who are already aware of their presence. As to be expected, many of them sound inhuman, angry and often creepy.
As mentioned earlier, there are maps with oppressive atmospheres in Quake. All of them have been designed to look gloomy, but not too dark so as to obscure enemies. Regardless of the lack of the dark places, there are still plenty of nooks and crannies inserted into levels, along with the occasional secret room that hides a bunch of enemies in ambush. Such designs give every level in single-player mode a sense of dread, as every corner is likely to throw another cause of danger at the player.
As for themes of the levels themselves, they are a wild bunch. One level can be medieval Gothic, while the next one can have an industrial vibe and the one after would be outright hellish. This keeps the scenery fresh (as fresh as sinisterly ancient-looking levels can be), but an observant player would recognize that there isn't much cohesion in their thematic designs to give any meaning to the story or more insight into the invasion force led by the entity known as Quake for that matter.
Yet, they still do portray the skill of id Software's level designers. Levels are filled with the typical sorts of objects to be found in FPS games: levers, switches, buttons, locks and keys and such. However, id's level designers made use of the 3D environments to add verticality to the obstacles that stand in between the player and these script triggers. For example, there are spiraling platforms that the player has to jump across, and alcoves on different floors that the player character has to drop onto from above to get to some keys.
Their skill is even portrayed in the difficulty selection phase in starting the single-player campaign; the player character has to navigate through a tiny map that has portals that represent the difficulty levels, and there is even a secret in this map that leads to the toughest difficulty setting, Nightmare.
Selecting chapters also takes place in a level, which looks like a hub of sorts.
There appears to be some repetition in level designs from chapter to chapter, however. Every chapter always starts with a level resembling a military base, which contains the portal to the invaders' home realm. This initial level will always be populated by crazed former comrades of the player character, as well as maddened dogs.
However, the later levels in any given chapter will be different from their counterparts in other chapters. Secret areas in particular can vary tremendously in number and rewards, with some early levels having secrets that reward the player character with very powerful weapons.
It is odd to note that Quake lacks musical soundtracks for its gameplay modes. Not even Nine Inch Nails, which (some of) id's designers like, is present in this game despite their logo on boxes of nails for the Nail Guns.
In addition to the executable for the single-player campaign, Quake can be run in multiplayer mode, which allows players to either cooperate to get through levels (or not) or engage in deathmatches. Deathmatches can be played in free-for-all or team-based variants. The game comes with its own server-hosting features, so players can host or join sessions, much like for Doom's multiplayer.
Yet, depending on the tolerance of the player, multiplayer can be fun, or infuriating. This is due to the exploits of the physics-scripting of the game that had been mentioned earlier and the weapon imbalances. Most matches would eventually boil down to a bunch of unscrupulous players hogging the spawning locations of powerful weapons, as well as constant patrolling of known player-spawning spots to catch any freshly spawned (and slain) players - often by making use of physics exploits.
Even co-op romps would suffer from such exploits, as experienced players would complete the level and force the game to load the next one before less experienced players would know where they are supposed to go.
Determined players will eventually gain enough skill to make use of the same tactics and exploits, but such practice inadvertently created severe barriers of entry.
Perhaps the greatest value of Quake, outside of its single-player mode, to be had by a game consumer is its creation materials, which are packaged together with the game. There were plenty of mods released for this game that use the idTech 2 engine in the first few years after its launch, many of which showcased the versatility of the engine (at least until id Software's competitors produced their own middleware).
In conclusion, Quake doesn't exactly make leaps and bounds above the core gameplay designs of its predecessors, namely Doom. It also has flaws that suggest design and testing oversights, such as imbalanced weapons and physics exploits. As a game, it may cease to be fun for those who are annoyed by such design oversights, especially if they are on the receiving end of punishment meted out using these.
However, being a showcase for idTech 2, Quake shows that innovations can be made to the usual gameplay for FPS games using new features allowed by a new game engine. Most importantly, Quake's greatest contribution to the shooter genre is its foray into true, full 3D environments without the hard-coded illusions that the shooters of Doom's generation had. This technological advancement alone would enter Quake into the Hall of Fame for electronic games.